Mac OS X Desktop Publishing/Fonts/LibreOffice Instructions

[emily kesselman]

The instructions for installing fonts, keyboards, etc. are out of date. Here's what I did, for OS 10.11.14 (El Capitan):

1. Downloaded and installed LibreOffice for OS X

2. Downloaded and installed all the OpenSiddur fonts

3. Installed the necessary keyboards from here:

 http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLHebrew.aspx

The link is from 2008 but still works with today's OS. 

Not sure about Yiddish keyboards, though.

[Aharon Varady]

Hi Emily,

Thank you for sharing this :)

Can you include the URL of the page with the out-of-date info you referred to?

While you're looking at this, could you verify that LibreOffice Writer is working without any issues in presenting Hebrew text with correctly positioned diacritics (niqqud, t'amim, etc.)?

It would be *great news* if OS X users had a gratis and open-source alternative to Mellel.

To test, look in the Open Siddur Hebrew Font Pack in the Fonts directory and open the file "Open-Siddur-Project-Hebrew-Font-Pack-comparison-v.1.16 (a).odt" and please let me know whether that looks good to you. (You can compare it against how the text is displayed in the PDF with the same filename in that directory. If you want send a screenshot of LibreOffice and we'll check.

I will be overjoyed if LibreOffice Writer is finally a reliable choice for OS X users!

Aharon

 

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[emily kesselman]

On the "Editing Text" page, this link is the one that is out of date (scroll down to "mac users") - http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors_macosx.html. At the bottom the last copyright date is 2005. It also doesn't discuss OS's beyond 10.3. We're now at 10.10. A lot has changed since then.

Also, I'm embarrassed to say the Keyboard layout I "found" was what you put in the Font Pack ALREADY. But the Yiddish one isn't also there, I don't think. 

[emily kesselman]

Here is a PDF of the document loaded in OS X. I see at least 3 issues at glance - #1 the "Shlomo" fonts will not install on OS X. There are errors that occur. As a result, it will not render that text correctly in the document. Second, "Frank Ruehl Curled Lamed CLM" appears to have missing characters. I'm unsure as to why that is. Everything else looks proper, but I'll let you judge for yourself. Even if those 3 are not available, that still leaves an incredible amount that is.

[Aharon Varady]

On the Text Editors page, there are separate recommendations for programs specializing in editing unformatted and formatted Unicode Hebrew text.

The instructions for formatted text (using LibreOffice) seem up-to-date to me.

re: unformatted text editors -- Please let me know if you recommend any excellent open-source programs for editing unformatted text in OS X that aren't suggested in http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors_macosx.html.

If anyone has a better reference suggesting open-source programs for editing unformatted Unicode Hebrew text in OS X -- please let me know so I can replace that link.

Aharon

[Aharon Varady]

Thank you so much for this!

Besides the Shlomo and Frank ruehl curled Lamed fonts, I'm seeing errors with the following fonts on OS X in your report:

Mekorot Vilna

Frank Ruehl CLM

David CLM

Miriam CLM

Nachlieli CLM

Dorian CLM and Dorian CLM Italic

I'll forward your report to the Culmus Project team. I'll also email Shlomo Ohrbach -- the Shlomo fonts haven't been updated since 2010.

Aharon

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Aharon Varady
Founding Director, Hierophant
the Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.org

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[Andrew Meit]

Aharon, 

Apple did a lot of font rendering tweaking since 2010 in their OS. (am on 10.11.4 now, 4k iMac) I will be glad to cross confirm her helpful work. Also font editing tools has been changed too to repair font generation bugs. So even a regeneration of the fonts might be all thats needed perhaps. I am currently testing a major font editor update that will have more tweaks for nonlatin fonts. 

Andrew

[emily kesselman]

I regenerated the TTF version of David Medium as an OTF, re-installed, and still saw the same issue. I did this with FontForge. However maybe you have better resources than I on this issue. It sounds like you have done more research. Let me know.

I'm still excited we have as many fonts as we do rendering properly. I think all the ones that show cantillation show up just fine, and that's the most complex to redner.